Young minds deserve better than Russell Brand

The OCR exam board's decision to let teenagers study Russell Brand, Dizzee
Rascal and celebrity Tweets as part of a new English A-level is barmy and
destructive

Russell Brand’s autobiography, published in 2007, is entitled My Booky Wook. Are there works in the canon of English Literature which, in your judgment, would profit from such re-Branding? Photo: Rex Features

My god-daughter texted me the other day with some exciting news: “My friends r doing ur articles in English lol!”

She’s right. It’s a funny idea. This column prides itself on using the Queen’s English with the respect and care that magnificent instrument deserves, even if I do begin the occasional sentence with “And”, which has older readers reaching for the Basildon Bond and would have given my poor English teachers a coronary. The kids say I am a Spelling Nazi. You bet I am. Mistakes on page or screen induce mild nausea and the rabid urge to circle with a red pen. When I see the word “fulsome” used to mean full or generous instead of insincere and excessive something in me dies.

If English and its literature ever need a Praetorian Guard, I will take up my Cath Kidston tea-tray as a shield. So, while it is very flattering to think of a class of 15-year-olds studying this column, it is also deeply dismaying. Isn’t there something better they could be reading? That’s a rhetorical question. I know there is something better – Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, Keats, the two Eliots (George and Tom), and that’s just the top of the premier league. If they have to study journalism, why not start with Defoe and Orwell?

The combined literature and language qualification will feature “extracts” from Russell Brand’s appearance before a Commons select committee on drug use and Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Dizzee Rascal. I have just watched the latter on YouTube, and the best thing about it is the look on Paxo’s face when he says “the hip-hop artist”, like a Duchess fishing an insect out of the salad on the end of a fork.

Mr Rascal, as Paxman insists on calling him, explains: “Hip hop is what encourage the yoof to get involved in making things better. If you believe, you can achieve, innit?”

Paxman’s incredulous disdain may offer a clue as to why one of our finest broadcasters has just announced he is quitting Newsnight, when the BBC wanted him to stay on until after the general election. “Are you really going to make me talk to this fool?” is the subtext.

Yes, is the answer. BBC producers with degrees from the best universities must all now sign up to the creed of Accessibility and Relevance. A&R is the faint hope that if you dumb down enough, you might attract a younger audience and not drive away the clever older people who are your actual viewers.

Arguably, this is a defensible strategy for television, where ratings matter. Not so for examinations, which are supposed to give young people what they need, not what they want. As a mother of teenagers, I would say that the very last thing they require is lessons in the “contemporary uses of language”. Because that’s like basically what they basically like get anyway, you know, and like, as a parent, yeah, you want them to stop talking like that, yeah, and speak like English, 'kay?

The flight from difficulty, which has been pursued in the name of helping children, is actually their enemy. I note that my daughter, who is predicted to get a high grade in English at A level, has been required during the course of her entire secondary education to read only one truly great novel by a dead author. That is not accessibility; it’s slamming the door on literary culture, and locking young people out.

Asking teenagers to analyse the linguistic contortions of a self-styled jackanapes like Russell Brand is akin to feeding them a cheeseburger when there is fillet steak there for the feasting. Ofqual, the exams regulator, still has a chance to block this fatuous new OCR course. Instead of patronising young people with Dizzee “If you believe you achieve” Rascal, our exams system should stick up for the best that has been thought and said. If it doesn’t, well, here are some questions from the forthcoming exams that have fallen into my hands:

1. Compare and contrast the ill-fated marriage of Rochester and Jane Eyre to the nuptials of Katy Perry and Russell Brand. Was there a first Mrs Brand, for instance, and where is she hiding now?

2. Carefully read the following passage by Rascal:

“ Wivv a Pina Colada or whatever you’d rather, / White wine, that’s fine, just get me a lager / Then after we’ll take a truck to the night spot / The hot spot, the top spot, party around the clock.”

In what sense is Rascal a) adhering to or b) parodying the traditional structure of the Shakespearean sonnet?

3. Expressed as a percentage, how likely is he to get off with the bitch addressed in Question 2? NB: Show your working.

4. In 2010, Brand starred with Jonah Hill in Get Him to the Greek. From the following list, choose which particular Greek was being referred to, and explain your choice: a) Aristotle b) the Delphic oracle c) Roussos Kebab Megashack, Dalston High Street.

5. Brand’s autobiography, published in 2007, is entitled My Booky Wook. Are there works in the canon of English Literature which, in your judgement, would profit from such re-Branding? Would “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, for instance, be more accessible under the title “My Donkey Wonk”? Or should Dickens have called his first novel “Mister Picky Wick”? Give examples of your own, using excerpts from YouTube and social media.

6. If Dizzee Rascal were to announce that his next musical project were to be a new version of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, how excited would you be? Marks will be awarded for getting as many exclamation marks onto the page as physically possible. Awesome!!!!

Jeremy Clarkson with second wife Frances Cain (REX)

Jeremy Clarkson will regret losing his driving force

How sad to hear that Jeremy and Frances Clarkson are getting divorced. We met the Top Gear star, his wife and their kids on holiday once and could see how brilliantly the relationship worked. If the Clarksons were dogs, Jeremy would be a crazy boxer or golden retriever, hurling himself heedlessly, but with great good spirits, at life. By contrast, Francie is a border collie or a black Lab. A lovely woman, blessed with a level temperament, she looked fondly on Jeremy’s barking excesses, but was ready to tug the choke-chain whenever things threatened to get out of hand.

Like the time Clarkson persuaded Himself to join him on a rubber tyre being dragged across a choppy sea by a speedboat. Let us just say that it was a bit bruising under the bonnet: fortunately, both men had already fulfilled their procreative function.

One reason Clarkson could be himself – basically, a nine-year-old boy about to release the class gerbils – is because he had Francie to take care of things. As both his manager and spouse, she was undoubtedly the driving force behind a career which is believed to have netted a £30m fortune.

Unfortunately, TV stardom has the magic and delicious power of reflecting the ego of a man at twice its natural size. Even if that man is a gallumphing Yorkshireman with dodgy dress sense. It also involves long periods of time away from home.

I bet Frances hated her media tag, “long-suffering wife of Jeremy Clarkson”. It made her sound like a doormat, which she certainly isn’t.

Ironically, one of Clarkson’s best pieces of television is a documentary he presented on Frances’s late father, Major Robert Cain, who was awarded a Victoria Cross for the most preposterous bravery. Frances was unaware of her father’s VC until after he died because, according to Clarkson, “he’d never thought to mention it”.

Like father, like daughter. Frances’s role in Clarkson’s success has been unsung, but quietly heroic. She deserves every penny of her divorce settlement. You wonder whether a recent run of bad publicity, for alleged racist remarks, would have happened to Jeremy if Francie had still been at the helm.

Frances is said to have taken a holiday to celebrate the end of her marriage, which would have been 21 years this month. I wish both of them well in the next chapter, though I doubt Jeremy will ever find a better woman, or Francie a man who makes her laugh half as much.

Wronged woman: Monica Lewinsky in 2001

Monica Lewinskyis still being judged

Time was when Time forgave all youthful indiscretions. Just as well. If we squint back at our 24-year-old self, we may struggle to recall who that person was. She/he was both us, and not us.

Time has not been so kind to Monica Lewinsky. In 1998, the former White House intern, a beaming, rather gauche 24-year-old in a beret, became universal shorthand for an act of oral sex. Lewinsky was a snigger in human form. Her humiliation went viral. She contemplated suicide. No cigar reference was complete without an obligatory smirk about what president Bill Clinton had or hadn’t done to the adoring intern with a Cuban import. Not since Marianne Faithful and the Mars Bar had a woman and a phallic object been linked quite so yuckily in the popular imagination. And let’s not forget that stain on the blue dress which launched a thousand dry-cleaning jokes.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” said Clinton, furiously wagging his index finger at his accusers. It was a clear case of the s--- quitting the fan.

Well, That Woman is back in the news with an article for Vanity Fair. Critics accuse Lewinsky of wanting to scupper Hillary Clinton’s White House hopes, but, 16 years on, Lewinsky’s claim that she was made a scapegoat are worth considering. Playfully, she chastises Beyonce for saying, in a forthcoming song, “Monica Lewinski’d all on my gown”. (As Lewinsky points out, it would be fairer, and more anatomically correct, to say, “Bill Clinton’d all on my gown”…)

But the powerful older male has shrugged off the offence which was at least half his doing. In the intervening years, while shagger Bill has become a global humanitarian helping African girls (no, not like that!), Lewinsky has struggled to find employment and, at the age of 40, seems to have neither husband nor partner.

She has paid a high price for youthful notoriety though, refreshingly, she is willing to blame herself. “Sure, my boss took advantage of me,” she writes, “but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.”

Monica seems most depressed that Hillary Clinton blamed two women for the affair: Monica, whom she called “a narcissistic loony-toon”, and herself for not being “emotionally available” to her husband.

As a feminist, Hillary Clinton might ask herself why her lying, cheating husband has been rehabilitated, while “That Woman”, as he so ungallantly called the young intern, continues to suffer from the shame. Why are women victims of this double standard?

“It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” says Monica Lewinsky. If only it were that simple. It was President Clinton who besmirched that blue dress, not Monica, but the stain is on her reputation, not his, and it may never come out.

Why women aren't getting David Cameron's message

What has David Cameron done for women? The Prime Minister says he is worried the Government has undersold its policies aimed at women. He has urged MPs to shout louder about things like the gender pay gap falling and legislating for the Married Couple’s Allowance, as well as an increase in the number of female Tory MPs.

You know, I’m not sure that telling female voters how lucky they are to have the chaps pay them attention is the best way forward. I tend to find the constant harping on women going out to work in ever greater numbers and becoming “economically productive” deeply insulting, particularly when study after study shows mums would like to spend more time raising their children.

Taking child benefit away from families on £40,000 a year, where only one parent is working, but letting families where both parents are on £40,000 a year (combined income £80,000) keep the benefit was simply outrageous. As was closing Sure Start centres.

We have a gaping care deficit in our society, and if sending more women into full-time work means lonelier old people and neglected youngsters, then Conservative politicians should do something about it. Quality of life is more important to women than tax receipts.

One other thing. I was lucky enough recently to attend a reception at No 10 Downing Street for inspirational woman. On the way up the famous staircase, I bumped into the PM’s backroom boys. They looked exactly like the same brainy nerds I had seen writing Cameron’s speech when I interviewed him four years ago. Not a single girly among them.